Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

others. A character’s desire to resolve some of his/her existential issues may be so strong that they
legitimize their destructive behaviors under a virtue. Becker explained in Escape from Evil,
My point is that heroic expansiveness, joy, and wonder have an underside—finitude, guilt, and
death—and we have to watch for this expression too. After you have melted your identity into
transcending, pulsating power, what do you do to establish some kind of balance? What kind of
forceful, instrumental attitude do you summon up to remarshal yourself and your grip on
experience? One cannot live in the trembling smallness of awe, else he will melt away. Where is
the object on which to focus one’s new self assertion—an object that is for most people a victim?
That is what we have to be constantly on guard for (121).
The character does not simply accept or reject a virtue, but carries on, and how they carry on may be
destructive. To say a character can reject a virtue suggests the virtue failed, or did not help the character
overcome their problems, when the character may be actually making destructive choices in honor of a
virtue, or even a religious worldview. We should not limit how we understand a character and their
choices. Literature can explore those we put down and those we dehumanize; actions legitimized by
potential virtues. It can explore our guilt and comment on the underside to our virtuous intentions.
Through faith, characters can immerse themselves in a transcendental idea of a group or a leader, or
characters can attempt to emerge as the hero within this transcendental worldview. Perhaps characters
instead immerse themselves in their communities and the lives of their family and/or friends, or want to
appear special among their community, family, and friends, illustrating the types of solutions relational
theology can bring to both characters, and readers. Or perhaps, to deal with their shortcomings and their
finitude, the character will accept life’s problems and mysterious, and attempt to do something meaningful,
something heroic, for the greater good, as they see it. In all of these possible virtues and worldviews that
can be explored in a text is the potential for destructive outcomes, because narrative reflects life. In a
larger project for the future, I plan to expand on exploring the destructive potential of the worldviews
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